Leadership: Establish the frame

Posted: 2025-09-08

Introduction

Leaders are communicating constantly –assigning tasks, sharing information, discussing problems. We assume that our intent is clear and our message is received as intended, but there are often gaps between what we mean and what our team hears.

This text recounts a few situations I encountered where information was misunderstood or lost due to suboptimal framing.

1. Bright engineer thought I was failing them

Early in my management career, I hired a very bright junior engineer, who was on a fast-track for growth. To accelerate their development, I deliberately gave them many stretch opportunities –tasks designed to push them beyond their comfort zone. As expected, they delivered well on some, and struggled with others. If anything, I gave them too many/ambitious opportunities.

Imagine my surprise when their feedback came saying I wasn’t giving them enough stretch opportunities! The star performer hadn’t recognized all these challenges as the very opportunities they craved.

The problem was in my communication. My initial approach when giving them a stretch opportunity was lazy. I’d simply say something like:

Can you take over this bug from me? I’ll help you.

My mistake was assuming the purpose was evident. I changed my approach to make the intent explicit, saying something like:

I have a task that would be a great stretch opportunity for you.

Can you take over this bug from me? I’ll help you.

This is a stretch opportunity because you’ll have to negotiate with a team in a remote office that has been particularly difficult to work with; plus you’ll have to work with a tricky part of our codebase.

I’m offering you this stretch opportunity because you’ve been excelling in your core projects, and I believe this is a perfect next step for your growth.

The work didn’t change, only the communication. By labeling these opportunities explicitly, the engineer now understood how many they were getting.

2. Updates from Leadership

A few years later I transitioned back to an individual contributor role and found my team a new manager. I watched closely, eager to learn.

The new manager immediately started making small but powerful changes. When sharing updates from our director or VPs, he would present a few slides with titles like “Updates from Leadership” or “Cascading Information”.

I had been sharing the same amount of information in team meetings, but I did it more casually. Taking a few minutes to put together a set of slides with an explicit title and simple agenda had a profound effect. Many on the team hadn’t fully understood that my informal updates were the “pass-downs”. The team’s perception changed: they felt they were now receiving much more information from leadership.

The amount of information didn’t change, only its frame. By packaging the information with an explicit frame, the new manager ensured its importance was understood.

3. “We have significant team-health issues”

I once mentored a manager who was convinced their team had “significant team-health issues”. The manager had dedicated various team meetings to this problem, genuinely trying to help.

However, from my perspective working closely with this team, the team was perfectly fine. Yes, they had the typical everyday complaints you’d find anywhere, but there were no deep-seated issues.

The frame of “we have significant health issues” was inadvertently creating the very problem the manager sought to solve. By repeatedly labeling normal friction as a major crisis, he was promoting the perception that the team was dysfunctional. This risked turning minor gripes into major grievances.

The leader must frame reality, not invent it. If a team truly has serious issues, they must be addressed head-on. But it’s equally important not to frame everyday challenges as catastrophes. Merely changing the framing of the situation helped the manager improve the team’s perception of its own health.

Your words, your world

As a leader, your words not only describe reality; they help create it. Your teams looks to you for context to make sense of their work, their challenges, and the organization around them.

When sharing information, make sure you use the adequate framing, supporting the narrative you want to establish. Give recipients adequate context to understand and appreciate the purpose of your actions.